Saul Steinberg (IVAM)

The exhibition of the artist Saul Steinberg (Romania 1914 – New York 1999) opens in the Sala de la Muralla at the IVAM February 2002. Steinberg trained as an architect in Milan in the thirties, and it was there that he began drawing. He moved to New York in 1941, publishing comic strips in various publications there, such as the newspaper The New Yorker or the magazine Life. During his career as an artist he published various books of drawings, the first two of which, All in Line (1945) and The Art of Living (1949), include drawings and early collages published in periodicals, while The Passport (1954) contains work done between 1948 and 1954. Other well-known publications by Steinberg are The Labyrinth (1960) and The New World (1965). Impossible to classify in terms of a specific art movement, he possesses a style of his own in which there is a very characteristic “economy of means”, a great simplicity of line, and a predominance of black ink rather than colour, which, however, he also uses. The result achieves great expressive power, and it precisely in this aspect that his genius lies. Steinberg tried to capture the reality of his time with a personal viewpoint that was more satirical, critical and comic than was customary, and to do so he used visual jokes, the title and graphic signs. He himself wrote “I appeal to the complicity of the reader, who will transform the line into meaning using our common past of culture, history, and poetry. In this sense, contemporaneity is complicity.” The Galerie Maeght has devoted various exhibitions to Steinberg, two in Paris and one in Barcelona in 1989. This is the first exhibition of Saul Steinberg to be presented in a Spanish museum. The work exhibited, 90 drawings and a painting, are grouped in terms of themes: masks, women, sport, cities, art criticism, philosophy, music and shadows. A substantial number of the illustrations, obtained from the recently founded Saul Steinberg Foundation, are now being exhibited to the public for the first time.